Did Asians prior to the Industrial Revolution eat primarily brown rice?

by LuseSkruw

EDIT: Thank you all so much for all the replies!

I've been living in Japan for a few years now. Everyone here seems more slim and healthy compared to back home in America, yet they eat plenty of white rice.

A Japanese student of mine, a doctor, and I got to talking, and he mentioned that while Japanese obesity rates are rather low relative to the rest of the world, their diabetes rate is almost the same as the U.S. (I haven't fact-checked this). He attributed the cause to white rice consumption.

I know that in Europe eating whole grain bread was the norm, at least for the peasant class, until the industrial revolution. So maybe Asians consumed primarily brown rice in the past too? Polishing rice without modern machinery seems extremely labor intensive. However, I can't find much info on the internet.

In addition, I recently watched a video about some people who defected from North Korea. One lady said they were so poor that they could only afford to eat white rice on their birthdays. So I thought, perhaps, they mainly consume brown rice there.

Does anyone know if Asians used to consume whole grain rice for the most part (I:m especially curious about Japan) ?

So maybe Asians consumed primarily brown rice in the past too?

Most of the rice they consumed was milled. This was because rice is harvested once a year, but the harvest must last for the remainder of the year. Brown rice doesn't have a long shelf life because rice bran contains oils and proteins which turn rancid upon contact with oxygen. You can eat freshly hulled brown rice, but a few months down the line it'll taste pretty bad without modern storage/packaging.

However, it's important to keep in mind that milling isn't an all-or-none process, it has grades depending on how much of the bran you remove. Modern "fully milled rice" has about 7-8% of the grain removed, including all the pericarp, most of the aleurone, and the germ or embryo. This was not achievable in medieval times, so their "milled rice" was what we'd call "under milled" or "medium milled" by today's standards. This is how they typically milled their rice before the invention of polishing machinery.

As a result of the partial milling, even the milled rice of pre-industrial times had enough vitamins left to not cause beriberi from thiamine deficiency.

There were some ways to make brown rice last longer. It so happens that the outer layer of bran (the pericarp) is relatively impermeable to oxygen, so it can serve as a protective layer for the stuff inside provided it remains intact during processing. The Japanese developed a method for dehulling rice that involved stone rollers cushioned with straw, which treated the grains more gently so they survived with mostly intact pericarps. Brown rice produced this way would last a bit longer.

There are other ways to keep rice healthy even after milling. In the late 18th and early 19th century there was widespread beriberi across many Asian countries, as modern polishing machines were invented and more of the rice grain was removed. The British noticed that for some reason, Indians were relatively immune to beriberi, even though they also ate rice milled with modern machinery. It turns out it was because Indians parboiled their rice in the husk before milling. The parboiling process drives the vitamins into the endosperm, so they remain in the grain even after the rice is milled and polished.

One lady said they were so poor that they could only afford to eat white rice on their birthdays. So I thought, perhaps, they mainly consume brown rice there.

No. Pretty much throughout the world, white rice is cheaper than brown rice. It's because the cost of milling is negligible compared to the value of increased shelf life. Probably what she meant was that on other days they didn't eat rice at all, not white rice, not brown rice, not any kind of rice. Rice is expensive to grow because it uses a lot of water, and unless you are lucky in your rivers, that translates to more energy needed for pumping. In many poor parts of the world, millet is the preferred grain because it needs very little water.